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Sunday, February 23, 2014

Education of a Raft Wacko

Illa-Tiki, John Haslett's first raft (top), hoisted a
single squaresail on a bipod mast. It was intended for a pure downwind drift
voyage from Ecuador to Hawaii. His next three rafts, all with two lateen sails
on pole masts, were meant for the more rigorous maneuvering of alongshore
sailing on the west coast of South and Central America. (click to enlarge)

I've written a number of posts about modern-day raft adventurers,
often referring to them as "wackos" because I find it amusing to do
so. (See our previous posts
on rafts.) The folks who set off to drift across oceans on (barely)
floating piles of vegetable matter are a special sort of mariner: brave, tough
and resourceful: without question; strongly committed to (or obsessed by) an
objective: very much so in most cases; a little "different?" -- uh,
yeah. (Please don't get me wrong. I use "wacko" is a purely positive
sense, acknowledging something of myself in that term. If someone were to
invite me to participate in a credible raft expedition, I might jump at the
opportunity.)

John Haslett started out as another raft wacko. But somewhere between the
construction of his first raft, Illa-Tiki, in Ecuador in 1995, and
the wreck of his fourth, Endurancia, in Costa Rica in 1999, he grew
into something else, as neatly described in the subtitle of his book Voyage
of the Manteño: The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner. (The book
was recently republished in Kindle format under a new title: The Lost Raft: The True Story of Madness, Mutiny, Mud, Sharks,
Shipwrecks, Survival, and Extraordinary Discovery in the Wake of Kon-Tiki.)
Not to say that he entirely lost the wacko attitude. But as his
expeditions morphed from mere adventures into serious research efforts,
Haslett's youthful dilettantism dissolved, replaced by maturity and competence
as a logistician, mariner, and leader.

All of Haslett's voyages were on balsa log rafts, begun on
the west coast of Central and South America. Illa-Tiki set out
from Ecuador bound for Hawaii, with no real objective other than to do something Thor
Heyerdahl-ish. By the time that voyage had failed, Haslett had redefined the
goal of his rafting efforts, so that his second voyage, aboard the raft Manteño,
was no longer just a voyage but, rather, an expedition
-- a voyage with a purpose -- seeking to demonstrate that
Precolumbian trade, which is believed to have occurred between Ecuador and
Mexico, could have been conducted by the Manteño people of Ecuador using balsa sailing rafts of the kind reported by early
European explorers, which reports are not universally accepted as accurate
or credible.

Not one of Haslett's four raft voyages came close to reaching its destination,
and the last one wrecked almost as soon as it began. But even in their
failures, Haslett's voyages contributed something to our understanding of the
rafts that the Manteño people might have used. Some of the most
important of those contributions are in the negative: Haslet''s experience
shows us just as much of what the rafts were not or could not do as it shows us
what they might have been and might have been capable of. That's the kind of
research, the kind of science, that we hear too little of, but it's every bit
as important to our understanding of reality as the so-called successes.

Haslett's book is a detailed record of gruelling hard work rewarded by the
"failure" of the voyages to reach their destinations. As I read Voyage
of the Manteño, I looked forward to summarizing it here,
for it is by far the most fascinating and best-written rafting
adventure I've come across.

But I've found that this has already been done competently by others, including
a nice summary of the first three voyages, and details about the construction and sailing characteristics of the rafts described
in academic but very readable form by Cameron Smith, an archaeologist who
accompanied Haslett on some of the voyages. There's no need to repeat these
available sources, and I leave interested readers to read them for specifics on
Haslett's voyages and vessels.

But I also urge them to read Haslett's book for a gripping, suitably humble,
and altogether satisfying first-hand account of how, through hardship, hard
work and the force of necessity, naivete can grow to maturity and seriousness
of purpose.